Nobel prize-winning economist, Edmund Phelps’s book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change is a bestseller in China. Phelps’s success in China includes the prestigious Friendship Award, “China’s highest honor for foreign experts who have made outstanding contributions to the country’s economic and social progress.” He was also named dean of China’s New Huadu Business School, which operates in Fuzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai. More information on Phelps’s achievements in China can be found, here.

It’s nearing the end of the year and that means everyone is taking a look back at the best and worst of the past twelve months. Bloomberg Businessweek recently published a “Best Books of ’14,” list to their site, and five Princeton University Press titles were selected as some of the best of the year!

Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, got things going; “Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber’s Fragile by Design is a magnificent study of the economics and politics of banking.”

Bjorn Wahlroos, Chairman of Nordea Bank AB (NDA), selected Edmund S. Phelps’s Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change and wrote, “[Phelps] redraws many political front lines and provides us with an answer to those who believe more public funding for investment and innovation is the road forward for our stagnant economies. It is a marvelous book that deserves to be read by everyone, but particularly by those entrusted with the design of the European future.”

“I…find his values-driven view of national prosperity fascinating—and applicable to corporate and personal prosperity. If innovation and the prosperity it yields stem from the values to which we subscribe as individuals, organizations, and nations, it stands to reason that we should be paying a great deal of attention to the particular values we adopt and espouse.”
― Theodore Kinni, Strategy-Business.com

To check out the full article, click here.
In this book, Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps draws on a lifetime of thinking to make a sweeping new argument about what makes nations prosper–and why the sources of that prosperity are under threat today. Why did prosperity explode in some nations between the 1820s and 1960s, creating not just unprecedented material wealth but “flourishing”–meaningful work, self-expression, and personal growth for more people than ever before? Phelps makes the case that the wellspring of this flourishing was modern values such as the desire to create, explore, and meet challenges. These values fueled the grassroots dynamism that was necessary for widespread, indigenous innovation. Most innovation wasn’t driven by a few isolated visionaries like Henry Ford; rather, it was driven by millions of people empowered to think of, develop, and market innumerable new products and processes, and improvements to existing ones. Mass flourishing–a combination of material well-being and the “good life” in a broader sense–was created by this mass innovation.

Yet indigenous innovation and flourishing weakened decades ago. In America, evidence indicates that innovation and job satisfaction have decreased since the late 1960s, while postwar Europe has never recaptured its former dynamism. The reason, Phelps argues, is that the modern values underlying the modern economy are under threat by a resurgence of traditional, corporatist values that put the community and state over the individual. The ultimate fate of modern values is now the most pressing question for the West: will Western nations recommit themselves to modernity, grassroots dynamism, indigenous innovation, and widespread personal fulfillment, or will we go on with a narrowed innovation that limits flourishing to a few?

A book of immense practical and intellectual importance, Mass Flourishing is essential reading for anyone who cares about the sources of prosperity and the future of the West.

Edmund Phelps was the 2006 Nobel Laureate in economics. He is director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. His many books include Designing Inclusion,Rewarding Work, and Seven Schools of Macroeconomic Thought.

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